Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe (1971)

In Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415 (1971), the Supreme Court held that those seeking a prior restraint on expression carry “a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.” Keefe, a real estate agent, obtained a temporary injunction prohibiting the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) from passing out literature criticizing Keefe’s real estate activities in Austin, Illinois, arguing that the literature distributed by OBA in his neighborhood of Westchester, seven miles from Austin, invaded his right of privacy and was coercive rather than informative. By an 8-1 vote, the Court reversed the Illinois state court ruling.(Historic houses in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, where Keefe sold real estate, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Keefe, a real estate agent, obtained a temporary injunction prohibiting the Organization for a Better Austin (OBA) from passing out literature criticizing Keefe’s real estate activities in Austin, Illinois, arguing that the literature distributed by OBA in his neighborhood of Westchester, seven miles from Austin, invaded his right of privacy and was coercive rather than informative. By an 8-1 vote, the Court reversed the Illinois state court ruling.

Burger argued that the respondent had failed to meet the “heavy burden” required to convince the Court that it should disregard this presumption on both points. First, Burger argued that the “claim that the expressions were intended to exercise a coercive impact ... does not remove them from the reach of the First Amendment” because the means of expression were peaceful and, similar to a newspaper, were attempts to influence conduct. Second, on the privacy argument, Burger emphasized that the “respondent is not attempting to stop the flow of information into his own household, but to the public.”